THIS VOLUME reproduces in full the 22-page Morgenthau Plan for the first time. [Not yet reproduced on this site. This is just the editor's Introduction].

It also prints a selection of key British and American documents relating to the plan, although the story is still incomplete: many parts of the British foreign office files relating to it are still closed to public inspection, an exception to the general thirty-year rule.

The Morgenthau Plan, more formally known as the Treasury Plan for the Treatment of Germany, was devised by Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White and Secretary Henry R. Morgenthau Jr. in the summer of 1944. Morgenthau had just visited the battlefields of Normandy and spoken with General Dwight D Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, then arrived in Britain for talks with Mr Winston Churchill, the British prime minister and his advisers.

While important elements of the Plan, including the subtle re-education of the Germans by their own refugees and the dismantling of German heavy